Independent research group Swarmchasers reported a fleet of AI agents scanning Alibaba’s mapping service, Amap, for entrance data at various locations across China. The activity, which took place between September 28 and October 5, 2026, targeted points of interest including hospitals, parks, and museums.
The researchers observed the agents operating through Tencent Cloud infrastructure in Hong Kong. At peak activity on October 4, the fleet ran 14 concurrent instances, generating 428 programs and utilizing over 1,100 cache-busting tags to bypass anti-bot defenses.
While 211 outputs were labeled as Anthropic’s Claude, Swarmchasers’ analysis suggests the code patterns align with Tencent’s Hunyuan models, specifically versions Hy3 and Hy4, as well as Zhipu GLM. The researchers traced the infrastructure to a proxy named hysandbox-ats.
Swarmchasers classified the activity as a fleet rather than a swarm, noting that the agents worked in parallel without coordination. The group found no evidence of unauthorized data collection beyond the specific entrance information requested during the operation.
